Voices in an Empty Room Page 25

  She has no more appetite and so she gets up with her plate and scrapes its half slice of toast, butter and marmalade into the sinkbin. She flings what is left of her coffee after it and then switches on the grinder. If she had more courage and less self-restraint, she might have flung the coffee into Eric’s sallow, sullen face.

  ‘I’m going up to London today,’ she announces. ‘Ellen will get you both some lunch.’

  ‘Again!’ Oliver will miss Bridget. Since Roy’s death, they have warily edged closer and closer to each other.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re off to attend another of those spook-sessions of yours.’

  ‘Spook-sessions?’ She pretends not to understand.

  But Eric knows that, of course, she understands, as he continues, ‘It’s useless, Mummy. Don’t you realize? Useless. Daddy’s dead and your father’s dead and that’s the end of it. If, somehow, they have survived – in some never-never after-life – why should either want to be called back to a world as bloody as this?’

  His vindictiveness is not really directed at her but at the circumstances of the death of the father, obtuse, reactionary and domineering, whom he loves only now that he has vanished. But Bridget flinches as though from a blow.

  Oliver says, ‘Perhaps they would want to come back in order to comfort Mummy.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t believe that crap!’ Eric sees the look of anguish on his mother’s face and suddenly he is penitent. In a now gentle voice, he asks her, ‘ Well, where are you going in London?’

  ‘I’m meeting a friend. Sybil Crawfurd. And she’s going to introduce me to Lavinia Trent – who’s a friend of hers.’

  ‘Lavinia Trent!’ Eric is more interested in the cinema than the theatre; but his girlfriend has a passion for the theatre and the opera and, unwillingly, he often has to accompany her to them. ‘She played Cleopatra here two or three years ago, didn’t she?’

  Bridget nods. ‘But I didn’t see it. You know how your father felt about Shakespeare.’

  Eric knows. He feels the same. ‘It would be interesting to meet her,’ he says.

  ‘Well, once I’ve met her, perhaps you will.’

  ‘Ask her down,’ Oliver suggests.

  ‘I might. If we get on. It’s easy enough from Brighton.’

  She goes upstairs. Her plan, long deferred, is to sort out Roy’s clothes for Oxfam. She has asked the boys if they would like, if not the shoes, shirts, pyjamas and underclothes, then the ties, suits, overcoats, raincoat, handkerchiefs. But they have recoiled from the suggestion with a kind of superstitious dread, just as she now, having pulled open a drawer on neat piles of shirts and pyjamas in cellophane envelopes, recoils. The last time that she opened this drawer it was in order to lend to the man whom she still thinks of as Tim Michelmore a pair of pyjamas. Though the police now have the man in custody, she does not have any of the clothes which she passed on to him. She does not want them, she has never asked the police if eventually they retrieved them, as eventually they retrieved the car, all bruised and scarred as though from a war.

  It is strange. Ever since ‘Michelmore’ played on her what that military-looking detective, with the reddish bristling moustache called ‘a diabolical trick’, she has had no more dreams. Each night’s sleep is a temporary death. She dies, she is totally extinguished and then, reluctantly and painfully, she endures a resurrection. Perhaps Eric is right. Why should anyone want to be summoned back from the dead to a world as bloody as this?

  She stands by the open drawer, with one of her hands resting on the pile of shirts which she was about to lift out. Her face, as intent as if she were listening for something, some whisper, some rusde, some call from afar, is reflected in the mirror on top of the chest-of-drawers. Beside the mirror there is a photograph of herself and Roy at their wedding in Chichester Cathedral. He was then still in the Army and they are walking out under an avenue of crossed swords. Suddenly she is reminded of childhood games of Oranges and Lemons: Here comes the chopper to chop off your head. She takes up the photograph, tosses it on top of a pile of shirts and then, raising a knee, pushes the drawer shut on it.

  Looking at herself in the mirror – so much has happened to her, both outside and within, and yet, to her amazement, her appearance has not changed – she thinks yet again, as she has often done, of that extraordinary visitation. She thought that she was entertaining an angel when (if that military-looking detective is to be believed) she was entertaining a devil. Or are the two things one? He knew so much about her: her past life, her inmost nature, her secret feelings and thoughts. The military-looking detective had remarked that that went without saying, conmen always managed to give that impression. Eric spoke of ‘empathy’. She was not sure what that meant. Empathy? she queried and he answered, ‘ What novelists have. Conmen and novelists have something in common.’ She still looked bewildered and so he went on, ‘He imagined you as you really are.’ But that merely complicated things yet further for her.

  She hears Ellen arriving downstairs. Eric and she are talking. Eric laughs at Ellen for her fads but secretly he admires her and is attracted by her. He would not mind going to bed with her, he once confessed to Oliver, who was shocked – ‘But, Eric, she’s ancient!’

  As Bridget makes her bed, she thinks of the day ahead of her. She will go to the National Gallery, not to any particular exhibition, but to moon vaguely around. She has come to enjoy that sense of anonymity in a crowd. Sometimes in the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the London Museum, she has had some unexpected, interesting encounter, usually with a foreigner as lonely as herself. There was a Japanese professor, terribly ugly, who talked to her incomprehensibly about his work on enzymes while treating her to tea and far too many cakes at a café crowded with elderly people reading Polish newspapers; there was a jolly girl, a schoolmistress, from the Hague, who was interested in UFOs; there was a middle-aged English woman, stout and woebegone, who tried to persuade her to go with her to, of all things, a thé dansant. There is appeasement and assuagement in such contacts, too fleeting to leave any more mark than a butterfly which momentarily alights on a leaf.

  The bed done, Bridget looks at her watch. It will soon be time for her to leave to catch her train. She goes to the door. Then she remembers something. Crossing to her desk, she takes up some sheets of paper (pointless, pointless, but Sybil has insisted that she bring them), folds them roughly and stuffs them into her handbag.

  Bridget goes down the stairs, to where, in the hall, Ellen is hoovering briskly, a silk scarf knotted around her hair to make a bandeau. The baby, plump and silent, is on the sitting-room carpet. Ellen kicks off the hoover, ‘Hello!’ she says. ‘I hear you’re off to London again. You’ve become a terrible gadabout.’ Roy used to say, ‘ If you’re not careful, that girl’s going to become altogether too familiar.’ Bridget has not been careful, the girl is too familiar. Bridget does not care; in fact, she prefers it that way.

  Yes, she says, she’s going to London to see a friend; and then she adds that she has made a steak-and-kidney pie and would Ellen please heat it up in the oven for the boys and also cook them some frozen beans. Ellen disapproves of meat-eating and frozen foods but she nods. ‘There’s also some yoghourt,’ Bridget adds. Ellen approves of that, though she wishes that the boys would eat it with brown, instead of white, sugar.

  ‘Where are the boys?’ Bridget asks.

  Ellen says that Oliver is still reading the paper in the kitchen and that Eric has gone out. ‘Gone out? Where?’ Bridget asks. It is odd that he should have gone out without saying goodbye to her. Ellen replies that perhaps he is in the garden.

  ‘Goodbye, darling.’ Bridget puts a hand on Oliver’s shoulder. He looks up at her, a fledgling to its mother, his mouth slightly open. He has been reading the sports pages of the Telegraph, while stuffing himself with slice after slice of bread piled high with honey. Something vibrates, high-charged and perilous, between them, like a high-voltage cu
rrent along a filament so delicate that there is the constant danger of a fuse. Bridget feels it passing back and forth between her ageing fingertips and the youthful bones beneath them. ‘Be good,’ she says, though he is never anything else.

  Oliver smiles up at her, strangely dreamy. ‘Be good too.’

  ‘I never have the chance to be anything else.’

  She kisses him on the forehead, says goodbye to Ellen in the hall and then goes out into the garden. Eric is nowhere in sight. ‘Eric!’ she calls half-heartedly. No voice answers. She goes over to the garage and is surprised to find the door open. The cars are side by side. She merely glances at the Mercedes in the gloom and then walks over to her Mini, which she will leave in the station car park. It is only when she has inserted the key in the lock of the door and is about to turn it that she realizes that Eric is sitting in the driving-seat of the Mercedes. She walks over and opens the door. She stares at him; he stares back at her with a defiant insolence.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’

  ‘Sitting.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Took the key from your desk.’ It was from this same desk that Bridget took the money that she gave to ‘Michelmore’, in addition to the money from her handbag.

  ‘You’d no business to do that.’ Eric shrugs and looks away. ‘That desk is private.’ Eric does not answer. Has he examined the sheets of paper now in her handbag? She wants to be angry but she cannot summon up the spirit. ‘You’re not to drive this car,’ she says.

  ‘Who says I was going to drive it?’

  ‘Without a licence …’

  ‘Who said I was going to drive it?’ he repeats.

  She slams the door of the Mercedes shut and goes over to the Mini, climbs in, and with trembling hands, attaches the safety belt. He is sitting at the wheel of his father’s car. He is looking like his father. He has talked to her like his father. It is another, perhaps even stranger kind of resurrection.

  She drives out of the garage, stops the car and turns her head sideways so that mother and son are looking at each other. She winds down the window, she smiles tremulously. ‘Goodbye, darling.’

  Hands on the wheel, he stares through her.

  Sybil will take down the Crown Derby tea service which belonged first to their mother and then to Hugo and which Audrey has now given to her as a keepsake. She will set out three cups, three saucers and three plates on a silver tray given to her to celebrate her twenty-five years as head-mistress of the school.

  Bridget will pay for the lunch that she has eaten at a table with three strange women, each of them silent, in the restaurant at Peter Jones and will then wonder whether, since service is included, she ought to leave a tip and, if so, where. She is never good at such things; and none of the other women has yet given her a lead.

  Lavinia will spray some scent on to her palm and, as she is sniffing at it, will suddenly realize, oh lord, she’s going to be late. She will say to the shop assistant that yes, she’ll take that bottle. The shop assistant will later tell another shop assistant that she has just sold Lavinia Trent a bottle of Prince Matchabelli Cachet.

  Bridget and Lavinia will travel up in the lift together. Each will guess who the other is and each will be on the point of saying ‘Aren’t you …?’ But they will each be silent, avoiding each other’s gaze. Lavinia will press the bell and then Bridget will say, ‘I thought we might be bound for the same destination.’ Sybil will open the door, handsome and formidable, and will introduce them to each other, even though that is no longer necessary.

  Sybil will go into the kitchen to make the Earl Grey tea in the Georgian silver teapot which also belonged first to her mother and then to Hugo. She will be scrupulous, as always, about warming the pot. Meanwhile, in the tiny sitting room, Bridget and Lavinia will be talking about the glorious Indian summer, the terrible unemployment figures, and the relative costs of houses in Brighton and Chichester. Lavinia will say that Chichester is so much less squalid than Brighton; Bridget will say that Brighton is so much more lively than Chichester. But neither would wish to live in the other place.

  Sybil will come in with the tray and Bridget will try to help her. Lavinia will know better. Sybil will say, with a hint of irritation, ‘No, no. Do sit down. I can manage, thank you.’

  ‘Lovely tea! Just what I wanted after a morning of shopping,’ Lavinia will exclaim.

  ‘Earl Grey,’ Bridget will say. She has, Sybil will privately think, a genius for stating the obvious.

  The women will begin to talk of the work of the Institute. They will talk of physical mediums, readers of the Tarot, palmists, psychometrists, metal-benders. Then they will talk of themselves.

  Sybil will be first. She will talk with a total, innocent frankness, surprising in a woman so self-contained and sophisticated, about her relationship with Hugo. ‘I’ve never been so close to anyone in my whole life. I’ve never loved anyone so completely. Often we didn’t have to say things to communicate. We just knew. That’s why it was such a shock to me when he announced, just like that, that he’d decided to get married. It was the only important thing in his life of which I’d had no previous inkling. That,’ she will add cryptically, ‘and one other thing, later … We used to say to each other that whichever of us died first, would make some sign to the other. Hugo always kept his word. Never, ever did he break a promise made to me. So, if he could possibly get through to me, however arduous the process, then he would do so. No doubt of that. None at all. But has he got through? Has he?’

  Neither of the other two women will be able to answer that quietly anguished question, even though she will repeat, ‘Has he? Has he?’

  Bridget will speak next. ‘I never knew how much I loved Roy until I lost him. There were times – I suppose there are such times in every marriage – when I used to ask myself why ever I had married him. He was everything to me, the children hardly counted, but I was never everything to him, though I know that, of course, he loved me, there was no one else, only his career as a war correspondent, about the best there was. I had that vision about my father’s death–’ she will forget that Lavinia, now puzzled but not wishing to interrupt her, knows nothing about it ‘– but when it really seemed that there was this, this messenger from him, he proved to be just a conman.’ Again she will forget that though Sybil knows all about ‘Michelmore’, Lavinia does not. ‘Sometimes I feel that, yes, he’s there, he’s trying to get in touch with me. And then at other times, there’s this deadness. Nothing.’ She turns to Sybil. ‘Of course there was that automatic writing of yours – the goose walking over the grave, the white flag turning black. That may be something. It may be. And there are all those vague messages through mediums at the Institute. But nothing, nothing certain.’

  Lavinia will talk less freely. She will hold something essential back. She will not be able to talk of Stephen’s self-mutilations or of that time when the schoolboy game of self-asphyxiation proved almost fatal. But, almost as hard, she will confess her failure as a mother. ‘I kept telling myself that every decision that I took and every thing that I did was for him, only for him. But, of course, I was wrong. It was all for myself. He was merely the excuse for my egotism, just as an animal, a dog or a cat, can become the excuse for the egotism of others, with their ‘‘I’d love to stay but must get home to put out the dog’’ or ‘‘I’d love to help but I can’t leave the cat.’’ That was all he really was to me – a dog or a cat. To be loved when it was convenient to love him and always to be fed and brushed and taken, if necessary, to the vet. It’s terrible to think of what I did to his life – or half-life. That’s why I want, want so much, to believe that it’s not all finished for him. That’s why I decided that as, as a kind of reparation, I must give up my acting. I had sacrificed him to it. Now it to him.’

  The three women will stare at each other.

  Then Sybil will take up again. Bridget will now find her somehow frightening. Lavinia will decide that Sybil is being extraordinarily,
well, sybilline. ‘We are such different women, until today we’ve never been really close. But somehow death has united us in a way in which life has never done. The silent majority of the dead? But there’s also the silent majority of the bereaved. Yes?’ She will look at the other two, they will nod. ‘These cross correspondences,’ she says. ‘They exist. I’m sure they exist. But who directs them? Is it Hugo, as part of an elaborate, tremendously difficult way of proving to me and so to you and so to everyone that, yes, the dead do go on into a world of light, yes, they do look down on us or up at us or across at us, yes, they do speak, however much in riddles, to each and every one of us? Or is it some universal intelligence? Or is it, well, just me? Or you?’ She will turn to Bridget. ‘Or you?’ She will turn to Lavinia. None of them will be able to reply. ‘The rationalists always have an answer.’

  They will talk of other things but now they will have talked themselves out and those other things will merely be scribblings in the margins of their previous discourse.

  Bridget will eventually say, ‘I brought you some more of my writings. And drawings. Do people often produce automatic drawings?’

  Sybil will nod, ‘There was a boy who produced automatic pictures which many people, even art critics, declared to be indistinguishable in style and execution from masterpieces by people like Picasso, Manet, Degas, Monet.’

  Bridget will scrabble in her handbag and will throw down some sheets of paper, as she rises. ‘Mustn’t miss my train,’ she will say. ‘The boys will be waiting for their supper.’

  Lavinia will also get up. ‘I ought to be leaving too. I have to be at the Barbican by six-thirty.’ Then Lavinia will glance down at the sheets of paper scattered across the table. One of the pencil drawings will catch her eye. Then another will catch it. And another. She will examine them, without the others – Sybil is finding Bridget’s umbrella for her – realizing that she is doing so.